<title>Recent advancements in photonic converters</title>

Abstract

Analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are an essential component of digital receiver systems. Progress at advancing the electronic ADC modules has been very slow due in large part to the difficulties in fabricating the electronic circuitry required for very high resolution and high sampling rate converters. This slow progress has resulted in a bottleneck between the received analog signal and the digital signal processing system. Single or multiple analog signal down conversion stages are required in digital receivers to down convert the received analog signal to an intermediate frequency (IF) that can be processed by the electronic ADC.There has been much recent interest in the use of photonics for direct digitization of the analog signal at the received RF frequency thus eliminating the need for analog down conversion. This paper reviews some of the recent research advancements in photonic ADCs. We will especially focus on the development of a novel photonic ADC module that uses semiconductor saturable absorbers to perform the data quantization. We will also present recent results in the development of a mode-locked fiber laser used as the sampling source in this photonic ADC architecture.

Dispersion and Nonlinearity Characterization of a Mode-Locked Erbium-Doped Fiber Laser

“…Recent advances have been made in photonic analog to digital conversion. [1] Many passive mode-locking techniques have been presented in the past operating both in normal and anomalous dispersion regimes. Recently semiconductor saturable absorbers in the form of bulk, multiple quantum well (MQW) or single quantum well -saturable Bragg reflector (SBR) have been used to mode-lock linear fiber cavities [2][3][4][5][6][7].…”